It seems it all just keeps coming... If I let a day go by, a week's worth has happened.

On Sunday afternoon, a child showed up on our doorstep, accompanied by two Nicaraguan woman and an American missionary named Sue. His name is Estevan. He had been living here a few weeks before I arrived, but had tried to run away three or more times before being removed and relocated.

He had been back with his family. His family, Sue was connected to because she had found them living in the dump, had compassion on them, and done everything in her power to help this family who were falling through the gaps. She bought them a house. She had outfitted the house, bought them clothing, school supplies, school uniforms, and set the mother up with everything she needed to make and sell tortillas for a living.

They recently abandoned the house, leaving everything behind. No one knows where they are. Estevan has been living on the streets. Sue had found him, and he told her he wanted to come back here. She came with him to ask if we couldn't extend compassion on him as well and give him one more chance.

Unfortunately, we can't. It doesn't work like that. The ministry of families here in Nicaragua, Mi Familia, are the only ones who can place a child with us. They case-manage all of the children here in our home. They need to ask Mi Familia to take him in, and they may or may not decide to place him here with us. Joy also has a voice in the process, deciding whether or not she will take him back in here given his history of throwing away the opportunities we've given him.

However, there are no guarantees. The political situation here in Nicaragua is very unfortunate for Estevan right now. The government is in the midst of a huge push to take all children out of homes such as ours and place them with their families, whatever families they have, or in a Nicaraguan home. They want to be able to present themselves to the rest of the world as being a country without orphans, without orphanages. Think about it. We're Canada. We don't have orphans, do we? The United States? No orphans. Yes, we have foster care, and no, it's not perfect, but we don't have orphans.

We do, however, have a carefully managed, well-designed care-system for children. With several cracks for kids to fall through. We have a beaurocracy that helps, and hurts. It's no dream, but it is well thought-out at least, while far from flawless.

The first lady of Nicaragua has made it her personal mandate to close every orphanage in the country, desiring to change the face of child-care in Nicaragua. And she certainly will. She has demanded that the employees of Mi Familia stop receiving new children who come to them into the system into centres such as ours, and that they instead be placed with family. Meanwhile the other kids already in the system (such as the 17 we have here) should be replaced with family members as soon as can be arranged.

It is no small concern the alarming rate at which this is all taking place. The timeline is tight, and it doesn't seem humanly possible that this new system can be designed and executed with all of the necessary safeguards to keep kids from ending up back in the exact same situation that put them in the system in the first place. Thinking of our 17 kids here, very few of them have appropriate relatives that they can go to live with - if they did, they would be there, and not here. As centres are being shut down rapidly in Nicaragua, the question has to asked - where are the children going? If these hordes of suitable homes existed, they would already have been in use, as that's always been the primary wish of Mi Familia to my knowledge, to place children with family wherever possible.

All this adds up to very bad timing for Estevan. He already has a case file with Mi Familia, so they will certainly do something for him. But now is not the time for anyone to be placed in a centre (orphanage) such as ours. Recently, most or all of Mi Familia's employees were fired for failing to stop admitting new children into the Nicaraguan orphanages - the first lady is quite serious about meeting her goal. This organizational upheaval resulted in serious interruptions to the process here, as you can imagine, as well as completely halting all adoptions currently underway in the country until all the vacant positions could be re-hired. (We have two such adoption cases currently underway in our home, and both of them are time-sensitive).

In the meantime, the only thing for Estevan and his rescuers to do is talk to Mi Familia, and wait. They came back today, and we explained once again to them that there was nothing we could do for him until Mi Familia first, and Joy second, made their decisions, and they laid on a thick guilt-trip, assuring us that they know that he has changed, for real this time, that he only needs one more chance, deserves one more chance, before they, too, will be satisfied to leave him to the consequences of his choices and the hard luck of his life, and couldn't we please just take him in on a trial basis, for a week or so? Though we explained again and again that we a) couldn't take in anyone with Mi Familia sending them to us, and b) would not take in a new child without Joy's knowledge and consent, the guilt trip continued. They just hated to see him suffer for the faults of his parents. They had their own children too, and they are so proud of how they turned out, and they just know that this child's problems are partly given to him by his parents' poor choices. (Estevan has a low IQ and what might be the effects of fetal alcohol). And couldn't we just take him in, only on a trial basis? We're both going out of town and there's nowhere for him to go!

Of course, our answer remained the same.

While my first encounter with Estevan was taking place on Sunday, I was also meeting Adán's family for the first time. It was pure pleasure to meet Adán's mom, Ruth, and his two little sisters, Dominga and Daisy, and to know that they were on the brink of some incredible life-altering opportunities. Adán was very sweet with his mother, and his two sisters warmed up more and more to us during their visit, smiling widely by the time they left us. I was glad to have met them.

At the same time, Bobby, the twenty-something American guy who's been here for the last two months, was departing on Sunday. Due to bad communication, I hadn't been aware of his plans to leave on Sunday, taking Don Profilio, the bus-driver with him, and hadn't arranged for anyone else to work on Sunday, as Ana (whose turn it was to work Sunday) would technically be working but would be occupied with taking Adán's family to Managua, and the other missionaries of Children Of Destiny Nicaragua didn't want me to be here by myself with 17 kids. After some last-minute scrambling, Masiel agreed to come in on her only day off of the week, and Bobby was able to depart on Sunday, though not exactly as originally planned. And given the type of day Sunday turned out to be, it was a very good thing Masiel was here.

Meanwhile, Nora's been very, very ill. She spent most of the last two weeks home from school, and half of that in the hospital in Managua. Since coming back, she's been throwing up every day (since Saturday). Nora's one of the muchachas, a fifteen-year-old girl who is very closely connected to my good friends from Seattle, Karel and Myra, who live in Managua now and are very much hoping that her adoption will be finalized soon.

Nora's now on a broth-and-gatorade-only diet, as we're trying to get her to keep food down and replenish her body's water and electrolites. After throwing up in the morning, she has made it through the rest of the day so far without puking, so she tried eating some gallopinto (Nicaragua's classic dish of rice and beans), and we'll wait and see if she keeps it down. Poor, poor girl. She can't afford to get any more skinny.

Meanwhile, Jeyson (the thirteen-year-old boy here who, if he weren't black, could easily be mistaken for my cousin Connor by disposition - and those of you who know what that means should probably pray) had a fever over 40 degrees today, the shakes and the aches. By the afternoon (around the time of Estevan's second arrival) we were quite concerned and had decided to take him in to the hospital, no small feat with only two adults to share around and one school bus for transportation. Meanwhile Irma (16) HAD to have new school shoes, as hers were completely worn through, and it couldn't wait a day. Which may have been true, but wasn't what I wanted to deal with at that moment, so I may have been a little ungracious with Irma. Meanwhile, Jeyson had all the symptoms of Dengae fever, a mosquito-borne illness that is potentially deadly.

The afternoon was a gong show of Ana taking Jeyson to the hospital, Masiel and I taking Irma to buy new shoes, and Don Profilio, the bus-driver and care-taker, collecting the kids after school. Masiel was off work at this time, so I headed home with the kids, and kept calling back to Ana to find out how Jeyson was, and whether or not we would need to pull another person out of thin air to spend the night with him in the hospital, as Ana would be off work at 7PM, and has her own family at home.

They ran tests for H1N1, gave Jeyson some medicine for his fever, which made a huge difference, and sent him home with some medicine and an appointment for more tests in the morning.

Meanwhile, Xochilt had bites all over her body, and needed to be bathed in a special tea to stop the itching, Francis (16) needed to find a gift for her boyfriend for their one-year anniversary tomorrow, and I had been promising to teach José how to play his new card game, "There's A Moose In The House", ever since his birthday - so tonight was the night. There are a smattering of other children complaining of colds, runny noses, and sore throats as well, but all these are minor cases.

Meanwhile, I eventually got fed up over the levels of fighting and bickering taking place among thirteen kids with kites. Despite my pre-emptive attempts to LABEL EVERYTHING! and keep them all safely in the office to avoid destruction, not a day has gone by without hearing "he took this!," or "she stole mine!", or, "I traded my kite for a Jet Li movie and now I want it back!" So last night I had every person present to me their complete kite, with both the kite and the handle displaying their own name, as it had been given to them after being labeled. Anyone who couldn't immediately produce their own complete possession recieved a "check", which is our main disciplinary tool here... two checks in a day is an hour's time out at night in the cancha, and three checks in a day means an extra hour of chores on Saturday. We eventually got everyone's own possession back in his or her own hands, and I'm hoping that the fighting over the kites will die down now that the kids know I'm on it.

Today I rode home with Xochilt beside me on the bus, listening to a sweet little nine-year-old girl make up an endless sing-song of thoughts and lyrics, and if you were once a nine-year-old girl, you might remember having done the same (don't deny it). Megan was known for sitting on our fence at home and singing to the horses. I did my singing while cutting the grass on the riding lawn-mower, which somehow was my confidence-boosting equivalent of singing in the shower. It was a cute moment, and it brought me fond memories of what it's like to be a nine-year-old with a sing-song mind - a sweet moment in the midst of a hectic life.